A report of Internet-related activities, published by Stanford University in 2000, asked 4,000 respondents to select among a list of 17 online activities. The results were not surprising. An updated report is forthcoming next week.

By far, e-mail is the most common online activity, an activity of 90 percent of all users; however, e-mail isn’t the principal reason most folk go online.

The net is an information goldmine, perceived by many to be a digital library. Users frequently search for commercial products, hobbies, and general information. Almost all respondents agreed that they use the net for information gathering.

Slightly over ovne third of users find entertainment value on the net, playing online games. A quarter of users reported using chat rooms; however, this activity is more popular with younger netizens, under the age of 25. Most chat activity is anonymous.

Business to Consumer (B2C) activity increased significantly; however, in 2000 only a quarter of all users reported engaging in online purchases

Dave’s Opinion
I offer these research data today in expectation of comparing them to the results of the upcoming report, which will include more current data. I expect that next week’s report will indicate that e-mail is still the most common online activity; however, B2C commercial activities will increase to include a significant majority of users, possibly over 90 percent of all users, including adults and teenagers. Online banking and digital music distribution have, in my research, encouraged these niche markets to put their credit cards forward, online.

Call for Comments
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

References
Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society

Google Becomes a Library. Digitizing the World’s Books?
Google, Inc., flush from a solid IPO, is serving five of the leading libraries by offering to pick up the tab for scanning the hallowed collections and making the resulting texts available online, in many cases, at no charge to the reader. The new project, Google Print, offers an entirely new way of conducting library research.

Libraries participating in the initial round of literary digitalization include Stanford University, with holdings of 8 million books, the University of Michigan, with 7 million titles and Oxford University, although only the pre-1900 collections will be available from Oxford. Harvard University and the New York Public Library have agreed to participate in a test phase, making a portion of each of their library’s holdings available to Google’s project.

Google, already has in index of 8 billion web pages, and this literary digitalization project would place the popular search engine in a league of its own, outpacing rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN web directories/search engines.

Dave’s Opinion
Google has, recently, been embroiled in a competitive wrangle over command of the desktop search toolbar market niche. This literary digitalization and search project puts Google into its own classification of data search and retrieval service. Desktop search services pale in comparison to the value created by making the world’s premier libraries available with the click of a mouse.

Anyone who thinks that the great academic research libraries are still to be physical place is missing the boat. If you’re one who loves wandering the stacks, you’re going to have to learn wander the keyboard, instead. And, wasn’t it just last month that I wrote about Google Scholar, the data retrieval company’s effort to make scholarly articles available online?

I’ve already received requests from Google to digitize my books. Maybe, it’s time for me to jump on the bandwagon.

Call for Comments
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

References
Google Print
Google Scholar